COGNITIVE

FEMINIST

STYLISTICS

Prepared by: Ms. Jemaima H. Hangalay

FEMINISTSTYLISTICS

Feminist Stylistics Feminist Criticism

Feminist Movement

FEMINISM

FEMINISTSTYLISTICS

•They hold a belief that

women are treated oppressively and

differently from men and that they are

subject to personal and

institutional discrimination.

FEMINISTS’ VIEW

FEMINISTSTYLISTICS

•They believe that there is a

general difference in the way that men and women are treated in

society as a whole and the way they

view themselves and

others view them as gendered

beings.

FEMINISTS’ VIEW

FEMINISTSTYLISTICS

Theoretical Bases of Feminist Criticism 1. Understanding of literature (written

by men) through the experience of reading

as a woman, and queries the supposed

‘objectivity’ or ‘neutrality’ and ‘universality’ of the

written discourse.

FEMINISTSTYLISTICS

2. Queries the evaluative procedures which have established a canon of literary works where “minor” writers are predominantly women. 3. Discusses the frequently misogynistic image of women in the literary works.

FEMINISTSTYLISTICS

Feminism and Feminist Criticism, therefore, have given rise to a host

of critical views about language, ‘the medium of literary reality, and the real world codification of social values’. Some of these views have

crystallized into a fresh text linguistic theory as well as an

approach to the study of stylistics referred to as FEMINIST

STYLISTICS.

FEMINIST STYLISTICSargues that there is a male

hegemony in both the treatment of women in society and their characterization in literary works.

seeks to formulate an authentic counter-image of women through their writings.

explores the ways in which literature expresses a decidedly female consciousness.

FEMINIST STYLISTICSIn the process, literary art is seen

essentially as a medium for the foregrounding of

female experience and the destruction of

male stereotypes about women.

Feminist Stylisticians place less emphasis on the

artistic on the artistic function of language than

on other aspects of language. The beauty of

form and language in a text is less important;

the techniques employed in the text as in

pornography is most central and essential.

FEMINIST STYLISTICS

Thus, the heart of Stylistics is the change in focus of analysis from the strict analysis of text in itself to an

analysis of the factors that determine the meaning of the text in

its social context. Feminist writings and feminist stylistics recognize that since

literature both reflects culture and shapes it, literary studies can either perpetuate the oppression of women

or help eliminate it. (McFadden, M.Feminist Literary Criticism-

Women’s Issues)

FEMINIST STYLISTICS

Feminist Stylisticians highlight in a systematic manner the self conscious attempts by female writers to modify traditional modes of language use –by identifying the dialectical features as well as the alternative forms of expression in a text.

Sarah Mills then describes stylistics “a form of politically motivated

stylistics whose aim is to develop an awareness of the way gender is

handled in texts.”

FEMINIST STYLISTICS

Feminist stylistics achieves its goals through close linguistic scrutiny and the explication of linguistic theory to set out the rationale for feminist textual

analysis. The GOAL therefore of this approach to stylistic study is the EVOLUTION OF LINGUISTIC and

SOCIAL CHANGE.

CHANGING TRENDS IN FEMINIST STYLISTICS

Early feminist stylisticians’ emphasis was

placed on the similarities between texts

produced by both men and women. In modern times, however, emphasis

has shifted.

They now insist that there is a ‘women’s writing’, which is

fundamentally different in style from ‘men’s writing’.

For Woolf, certain women writers crafted a new type of sentence

which is looser and more accretive than the male sentence.

Virginia Woolf asserted that there was a sentence which women

writers had developed which she termed the “female sentence” or

the sentence of the feminine gender.

Modern feminist stylisticians thus insist that men and women differ even in their ways of thinking and perceiving reality. The linguistic differences in the way men and

women perceive social reality is now technically referred to as

“genderlect”.Woolf refers to this as the “female sentence” and Mills describes it as

the “gendered sentence”.

CHARACTERISTICS OF MALE AND FEMALE SENTENCES

Male Sentence

THEMATICALLY

Female SentenceHas the element

of control and choice

Clear and rational

Assertive and authoritative

Aims for admiration and approval Lacks authority & rationality

Emotive

Apologetic

Feminist stylisticians repudiate such genderlectal suffixes as ‘-man/-woman’ and ‘-ess’ in

expressions like ‘draughtsman/woman’, ‘air hostess’ and the cataphoric use of ‘he’ to include

male and female. They instead advocate:

LEXICALLY

-draughter(s) (not draughtsmen/women)-flight attendant(s) (not flight steward/ess)-hotel attendant(s) (not waiter/waitress)

CHARACTERISTICS OF MALE AND FEMALE SENTENCES

Women are said to prefer such devices of hedging as ‘really’, ‘however’, ‘because’, and ‘so’ more often than men.

Personalized pronouns as ‘I’, ‘she’, ‘he’ and ‘they’ are associated with women’s writings while male texts prefer determiners like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘these’, ‘more’ and ‘some’.

LEXICALLY

CHARACTERISTICS OF MALE AND FEMALE SENTENCES

Women’s sentences are generally shorter and so ‘structurally less complex than longer sentences’, and that because of a perceived lack of variety in sentence length ‘fewer of the female writers possess a noteworthy style than do their male counterparts’.

GRAMATICALLY (SYNTACTIC LEVEL)

CHARACTERISTICS OF MALE AND FEMALE SENTENCES

Another major distinction between the female and the male sentence at the syntactic level is that whereas men’s writing prefers subordination (suppression; hypotaxis; inequality) which is exemplified by subordinate clauses and complex sentences, that of women employs co-ordination (parataxis; equality).

The result of this is that men’s writing has the effect of hierarchizing, suppressing and ordering.

CHARACTERISTICS OF MALE AND FEMALE SENTENCES

Coupland (2077 p.58) posits in support of this view that: Feminist writers pursue non-linear, anti- hierarchical and discentred writing.

But Mills concludes that the female sentence is far more grammatically complex than the male sentence which is linked only by hypotaxis, that is, by that fact that the clauses are placed side by side; but it is classified as female because it is concerned with emotion and dominance. (Mills, 1995 p.54)

CHARACTERISTICS OF MALE AND FEMALE SENTENCES

Paradoxically, while the male sentence with its subordination and hierarchizing is seen as transparent, the female sentence is described as opaque on account of its complexity.

CHARACTERISTICS OF MALE AND FEMALE SENTENCES

SUMMARY

FEMINIST LINGUISTICS is a systematic, empirical analysis of a

text’s language, which brings to light patterns or representation of issues of sexism, political correctness, reader

positioning, agency, discourse, character and sentence analysis.

Thus, feminist stylistics will continue to interrogate the

linguistic basis for the struggle of the emancipation of womanhood as reflected in literary and non-literary

texts.

COGNITIVE STYLISTIC

S

Cognitive stylistics combines the kind of explicit rigorous and detailed linguistic analysis of literary texts that is typical of the stylistics tradition with a systematic and theoretically

informed consideration of the cognitive structures and

processes that underlie the production and reception of

language (Semino and Culpeper 2003).

"What is new about cognitive stylistics is the way in which

linguistic analysis is systematically based on theories that relate linguistic choices to

cognitive structures and processes. This provides more

systematic and explicit accounts of the relationship between texts on the one hand and responses

and interpretations on the other."

(Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper, Cognitive Stylistics)

Semino and Culpeper strongly argue that just as linguistics matters to stylistics, so too does psychology matters to

cognitive stylistics.

As Don Freeman writes in his afterword to Cognitive Stylistics, `what the essays in the volume share is a far firmer empirical basis and multidisciplinary theoretical approach than was possible given the state of our knowledge in the early 1970s about human cognition’ (Freeman 2003: 319).

In Gerard Steen’s essay in Cognitive Stylistics, “Metaphor in Bob Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’: Genre, Language and Style,”

Steen analyzes a song about a boxer with the potential to become a world champion but who is framed for murder by police in New Jersey and later imprisoned.

“Should a cognitive approach to language and style ‘aim for a relatively superficial ‘psycholinguistic’ account for the initial stage of accessing and integrating the words of the utterances, or for a relatively deep and more generally cognitive account of some intermediate or further stage of message construction?” (2003: 192).

As Steen asks:

Steen notes that while some critics have imagined cognitive

stylistics to be a branch of cognitive linguistics, he

nevertheless desires to locate cognitive stylistics within the

cognitive psychology of reading (2003: 194).

For Steen, “Cognitive- stylistic analysis of language and style needs to assume some sort of framework for the cognitive

processing of texts, and that is what may be found in the

psychology of reading”. Steen’s emphasis on psychology, in other

words, is an attempt to defend some of the assumptions made in

cognitive stylistics.

Steen’s version of cognitive stylistics also relies on empirical methodology. After explaining the relevance of research in

psychology to stylistics, Steen then tests a prediction he makes about how readers/listeners will identify metaphors in the Dylan

song.

And according to Steen, “Cognitive Stylistics is an

admirable work – but it requires serious training in

social science research design.”

He adds, “producing a movement back and forth

between theory and data...is what cognitive stylistics is all

about.

“Only in that way can linguists and cognitive psychologists begin to

cooperate on the study of language and style in

reading and other forms of language use” ( Steen, 2003:

207).

According to Simpson, cognitive stylistics is “one of the established

branches of contemporary stylistics”, but, as he admits, “What distinguishes cognitive from other sorts of stylistic models is that the

main emphasis is on mental representation rather than on

textual representation” (2004: 92).

•For Simpson, defining language as a form of cognition allows us to study the human mind when it appears that what we are studying are texts.

•What this means for cognitive stylistics is

that we must give equal attention to

language and the mind when one of our

objects of study, figurative language,

resides within the human conceptual system.

As Simpson writes:Stylisticians [in the 1990s] began...exploring more systematically the cognitive structures that readers employ when reading texts. In doing so, they borrowed heavily from developments in Cognitive Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence, and this new emphasis in research method saw the emergence of cognitive stylistics or cognitive poetics.

While cognitive stylistics is intended to supplement, rather than supplant, existing methods of analysis, it does aim to shift the focus away from models of text and composition towards models that make explicit the links between the human mind

and the process of reading (Simpson 2004: 39).

According to Simpson, cognitive stylistics is “one of the established

branches of contemporary stylistics”, but, as he admits, “What distinguishes cognitive from other sorts of stylistic models is that the

main emphasis is on mental representation rather than on

textual representation” (2004: 92).

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